Editor’s Clinic: A Look at your Hook

I’ve written before about the dangers of working too hard to create your hook. That’s what I believe you’re doing here. The big shock of your opening scene is that your narrator was expected to eat a chicken that had become a pet. But I think the drive to hook your readers quickly led you to pack that shock into your opening sentence.

But this reduces that key reveal to simple information. The fact is shocking in the abstract, yes, but your readers learn it before they know anything about your narrator or her situation. They don’t have any emotional connection to the person the shock is happening to. You can create that emotional connection just by delaying the reveal by half a page or so.

You’ve also fallen into the trap of feeding your readers the background they need to know as quickly as possible. Except that you’re doing it at the expense of your narrator’s character – having her think of things that she would, in real life, take for granted. Once again, this gets information to your readers, but undermines the emotional connection they’re forming with the narrator.

Remember, the thing that draws your readers into your story most is that they care about your main character. When you take the focus off your narrator to do other, less important things (like shocking your readers or filling them in on background) you leave them caring less. Every writing book or blog will tell you that you need to hook your readers quickly. But don’t be so obsessed with the hook that you forget where your true story lies.

Chapter 1

I couldn’t eat my best friend, even if she was a chicken. You’d think I would have known what to expect after she stopped laying eggs. One day, when I returned home after cleaning hotel rooms, Mama handed me the mixing stick as soon as I walked into the village. [1] I almost refused, but if I were going to eat, it was only fair I helped cook. Besides, theSsun warmed my aching shoulders as I stirred the rainwater stew.

Villagers who added rice and yams circled around, singing about the food we would eat. As I listened, mMy mouth watered and my stomach rumbled. But something was missing. [2]

[Name], mMy chicken, [3] always greeted me after work. She liked to peck at my bare legs until I petted her. As I continued stirring the stew, I waitedkept an eye out for her. But she didn’t come.

Then the warmth of the open flame forced me to take a step back. That’s when I noticed an orange feather lying at my feet. The moment I realized what happened, [4]

I let go of the mixing stick. “Where’s [name]my chicken?” I asked Mama, shaking her arm.

I looked more closely, and there were My chicken bones floating was in that stew.

I bent down to picksnatched [5] up the feather and dusted away the dirt ran [6]. No one chased after me to dry my tears as I ran along the gravel road and darted between women carrying baskets of fruit or jugs of water on their heads.

How could Mama put my only friend in the stew? But I knew the answer even before I asked the question. She was only trying to feed me. And [name] had not laid a little brown egg in months.

EBut even my chicken[name] knew little brown eggs weren’t all she could providecould help keep my stomach full the day she followed me into my rickety one -room hut [7]. She sensed I needed someone who would notice my tears. But my chicken was so much more; s She was my only friend in Ghana, a country in Africa where we were born [8].

Neither of us had time for other friendships because I worked too much and my chicken was busy eating bugs from our dirt floor whenever she wasn’t laying an egg. After Mama got sick in the heart she had to give up cleaning rooms at the Monarch Hotel in downtown Kumasi. [9] When I was eleven, I quit school to clean the rooms Mama couldn’t. With my days spent scrubbing hundreds of toilets, it was impossible for me to make friends. There wasn’t time. And [name] was too busy eating bugs from our dirt floor whenever she wasn’t laying an egg.

I thought I should have been rich from so much cleaning. B but I barely made enough money for the rent. That’s why I’d never be able to pay what Mama owed the one I called Crazy Man. He sold her medicine to fix her heart. When Mama said she couldn’t afford it, he told her she could pay him back later. And she agreed, because better to be in debt later than dead now.

ThoseCrazy Man’s purple pills weren’t like the potions the village medicine man made. Mama said they tasted sweet, like candy. ThatAnd they medicine didn’t make her feel any better.

I thought about my problems as I raced alongside rows of shacks and past the corner store, the only place in the village with electricity where people a small group gathered to watch a soccer matches on a television, the only one in the village. All that running made me thirsty, so I stopped at the pump in the square.

I didn’t think my day could get worse. But it did. then Crazy Man found me drinking from the water pump.

You needed a bit more scene setting.

Stretch the moment of realization out a bit. The realization is shocking. Give your readers time for the shock to settle in.

The chicken should have a name. It emphasizes the connection your narrator had with it.

Show her realizing what happened.

You want a strong verb at this point.

And once the truth is out there, let the action explode.

This is where you start feeding information to your readers at the expense of your character. She wouldn’t think of her own home as “rickety,” would she?

And here you are really packing in information. Readers can guess the story is set in Africa from the details, and you can fill in the specific location later.

Here you can establish the location a bit more naturally.

Wish you could buy this author a cup of joe?

Dave King is the co-author of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, a best-seller among writing books. An independent editor since 1987, he is also a former contributing editor at Writer's Digest. Many of his magazine pieces on the art of writing have been anthologized in The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing and in The Writer's Digest Writing Clinic. You can check out several of his articles and get other writing tips on his website.

Comments

Excellent as always, Dave. I love the deletion of the opening line hook. It’s hard to build tension when you start with an explosion.

I’d like to point out another weak point, one that I would have edited out or changed:

“How could Mama put my only friend in the stew? But I knew the answer even before I asked the question. She was only trying to feed me.”

I knew that question even before I read it. My reader brain had already zipped ahead of the author.

Stating the obvious is what I call “churning exposition”; that is to say, stirring a pot full of thoughts and feelings that have already been stirred, eaten and digested by the reader. It feels like filler. It’s not especially nourishing.

I see your point, Don, and yes, the passage would be cleaner without that bit of interior monologue. But I left it in as part of the creation of the character. As she ran through the village and tried to deal with her shock and grief, this is the kind of thought that would churn over in her mind.

This is why editing is an art, not a science.

It’s also why clients should take their editor’s suggestions as suggestions. We often see a way to make improvements. It’s not necessarily the only way.

This in medias res opening has a lot going for it. First, something real is happening: the girl is given a spoon to stir the pot. There is also tension in the act: discovering her favorite chicken stewing inside.

The reader is quickly given the facts of the matter: the family’s poverty permits no other outcome for a hen that won’t lay. While that’s sad and evocative, I think the writer is missing the deeper puzzle, namely Mama’s cruelty in simply handing her daughter the mixing stick without explanation, knowing full well what was in the pot. Why didn’t Mama soften the blow with a word or a warning touch? With nothing else to go on but my own intuition of how a mother should behave toward her child, I’m left with distracting questions that take me out of the story. Who is Mama that she would do this to her girl? Did Mama hate the chicken for some reason? Or did she want to teach her daughter a brutal lesson? Why? Without denying the family’s caloric imperative, I’m left undernourished about the emotional undercurrent, which might be suggested in a few phrases or lines. As a reader, I’d be willing to put off learning about purple sugar pills and the Crazy Man a little while in order to get a clearer fix on the relationship between Mama and her daughter.

What’s the relationship between the mother and her daughter like? It’s a fair question, Doug. Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer.

Since I’ve only seen the first chapter of the work, I don’t know what role the mother/daughter relationship will play later in the story. There’s a risk that focusing on it now would give it more emphasis than it deserves.

There’s also the problem that American readers probably wouldn’t be able to fully understand the relationship without immersing themselves more thoroughly in the culture. The fact that the mother is cooking the stew in public, and that other villagers are adding ingredients and intending to share in it, hint at a skein of social responsibilities that probably influenced the mother’s decision. I don’t think it would be possible to give a thumbnail sense of their relationship without doing it in western terms — the only terms western readers would understand — that may not apply.

You are right, though, that it is pretty undefined in the original. I did try to give some hint of what was going on with the mother’s inability to meet her daughter’s eyes. I was hoping it would suggest guilt over having to take such a necessary step, whatever the reasons that drove her to do it.

This is a terrific service, and one that helps me as a writer each time. Thank you!

The problem of how to give the reader background information the narrator wouldn’t be thinking of is an eternal one. I agree with all your suggestions here. Can I add one of my own? At the place marked [8] you take out the explanation that Ghana is “a country in Africa where we were born.” I agree that has to go. Still, it could work to slip in the name of the country, by having the narrator think, “…my only friend in all of Ghana.” That might anchor the story in Africa without feeling completely forced.

Thanks again, and I look forward to seeing many more of these. I may even submit something of my own one day!

Always instructive. Thank you, Dave. I needed a sense of place first and foremost. And like Doug, I wanted to know the relationship between mother and daughter–were they adversaries or partners in survival? But then again I am attracted to mother-daughter father-son stories.

Another thought–open with showing the tenderness between the girl and the chicken, that way, when it meets its demise, I can feel the loss.

As it is, I found myself grinning because my husband used to talk about shooting the ducks in our pond for supper. I did have a pet chicken many years ago–and had to give it away to Chicken Paradise (yes, that was the name of the farm). I imagine it had a good life and served its purpose.

We picked up two chickens years ago, believing that they were too . . . intellectually basic to become pets. After a few years, one died, and we replaced her. But after the second one died, we realized that they had become pets, so our one remaining chicken is now living out her retirement. We’re just going to take care of her until the end.

Super useful. Reminds me of the old quote “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Great reminder that making your characters likable, or at least interesting is critical.